Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said during an interview this week that Democrats need to be concerned about not only losing independent voters in the upcoming midterms but also losing the base of the Democrat Party.
Ocasio-Cortez made the remarks in an interview with New York Magazine. The discussion included AOC’s claims that “senior members of Congress, who have been around in different political times” want to work in a “buddy-buddy and backslapping” political system where “we’ll cut a deal and go into a room with some bourbon and some smoke and you’ll come out and work something out.”
“I think there’s a real nostalgia and belief that that time still exists or that we can get back to that,” she claimed. “We need to acknowledge that this isn’t just about middle of the road, an increasingly narrow band of independent voters. This is really about the collapse of support among young people, among the Democratic base, who are feeling that they worked overtime to get this president elected and aren’t necessarily being seen.”
Ocasio-Cortez said that Biden, who is facing horrific polling numbers, needed to pursue an even more far-left agenda to fire up the party’s base:
But those days, she says, have been over for a long time. And the fact that Biden and others don’t realize it, she says, could spell disaster in the fall’s elections. With Biden’s low approval numbers and the historic tendency of the president’s party to lose, on average, 26 House seats in the midterms, the Democrats face an uphill battle to keep control of Congress — a situation that requires firing up the party’s progressive base, Ocasio-Cortez said. … Ocasio-Cortez and the other 97 members of the House Progressive Caucus are calling on Biden to issue executive orders to enact environmental protections, lower health-care costs, cancel federal student-loan debts, and expand protections for immigrants.
“If the president does pursue and start to govern decisively using executive action and other tools at his disposal, I think we’re in the game,” she said. “But if we decide to just kind of sit back for the rest of the year and not change people’s lives — yeah, I do think we’re in trouble. So I don’t think that it’s set in stone. I think that we can determine our destiny here.”
Ocasio-Cortez also complained about the lack of Latino representation, apparently among the Democrat Party. “I think it’s really disgraceful, frankly, the lack of Latino representation,” she said. “And the thing is that this isn’t just about identity representation, it’s also about issue representation.”
Related: